We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

A Jesus Kind of Church
The church can only be the conduit of God’s love if it stops judging others (See yesterday’s post). This means that it will stop being concerned about its reputation in the eyes of those who practice this religious judgment. The only reputation we need be concerned with is to have the one Jesus had. He was known for his unprecedented love, by those who would receive it, and scorned for his irreligious attitudes, by those who would not.
Jesus’ religious reputation was tarnished in the eyes of religious people because he did not honor many of the religious taboos of his day. Walking in unity with the Father, Jesus possessed a joyful freedom—a kind of recklessness—that was scandalous to those whose worth was derived from their supposed ability to judge good and evil. Jesus hung out with women, some of whom had tarnished reputations. He fellowshipped with tax collectors, drunkards, and other sinners. He healed and fellowshipped with lepers. He praised Gentiles, Samaritans, and even prostitutes and tax collectors over respected Jewish religious leaders.
Among the religious, Jesus’ reputation was dishonorable. But Jesus wasn’t concerned about his reputation. Jesus came to heal the sick, not to placate the religious sensibilities of those who thought they were healthy (Mark 2:17). To heal the sick, you have to love the sick. And this means you have to ignore what those who (mistakenly) think they’re healthy think about you!
The singular task of the church is to replicate this eternal, reckless love to the world. One indication that we are doing our job well is that sinners on the fringes of society will be enjoying fellowship with us, as they did with Jesus. Another indication, directly resulting from this, is that those who judge by religious standards (they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) will judge us.
If, for example, a church treats the LGBT community with the same compassion religious judges extend toward divorced folks or people who struggle with weight issues, its leaders will likely be condemned as “compromising the Word of God” by these judges. Such a church is sinning against the (self-serving) knowledge of good and evil from which the religious judges feed. Consequently, the judges will likely feel as though their god has been assaulted, and, as a matter a fact, it has! As idolatrous people often do when their gods are threatened, they may rage. They did so with Jesus, and they will do so today when a church looks like Jesus.
A church that celebrates the cessation of judgment and loves as God loves has to be willing to have their reckless love scorned as compromising, relativistic, liberal, soft on doctrine, or antireligious. After all, what kind of church attracts and embraces prostitutes, drunkards, gays, and drug addicts? What kind of church routinely has smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and bums ushering in their services, hanging out in their small groups, singing in their choir, signing up for classes, etc.—without anyone immediately confronting their sin? What kind of church would accept a woman who was still living with a man out of wedlock after having gone through five marriages? (See John 4:1-26). What kind of church blurs the boundary between those who are “in” and those who are “out” to this degree?
The answer is a Jesus kind of church.
—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 196-198.
Photo credit: racineur via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Church, Judgment, Love, Religious Idolatry
Topics: The Church
Related Reading

What About the Harsh Words of Paul? A Response to Paul Copan (#4)
This post is my fourth response to a talk given by Paul Copan at the Evangelical Theological Society in November in which he raised a number of objections to Crucifixion of the Warrior God. A major part of Copan’s critique centered on my claim that the love of God that is revealed on the cross,…

The Risk of Love & the Source of Evil
On Sunday Greg tweeted the following: Love IS a tremendous risk. But if humans ever concluded the risk was not worth it, we likely become extinct rather quickly. … Yes, love is risky. It costs us everything, and we sometimes get terribly hurt. But it’s this risk that “makes the world go round.” … And…

Signs of Hope
https://youtu.be/nl78l20AGP0 Greg taped this video for the Nomad podcast series called Signs of Hope. He discusses the hope he finds in the death of Christendom, and the rise in the beautiful new, peace-loving, non-violent, Jesus-centered, global movement.

Is God All-Powerful?
I want to answer yes and no. God is all-powerful in the sense that God originally possessed all power. Before Creation, God was the only being who existed, and thus had all the power there was. He could do anything, and nothing opposed Him. But with the creation of free creatures, I maintain, God necessarily…

God’s Heart to Prevent Judgment
In Ezekiel we read a passage that depicts Yahweh as warning his people about their impending punishment by saying, “I will pour out my wrath on you and breathe out my fiery anger against you” (Ezek 21:31a). As we find in several other texts, Yahweh is here depicted as a ferocious fire-breathing dragon—a portrait that…

The Cleansing of the Temple and Non-Violence
Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple is the most commonly cited example of those who allege that he did not absolutize loving enemies or refraining from violence. I submit that this episode implies nothing of the sort. First, it is important that we understand that this episode was not an expression of unpremeditated anger on Jesus’…